259: My Over Eating Experiment [2nd Edition]

Chris Sandel: Welcome to Episode 259 of Real Health Radio. You can find the show notes and the links talked about as part of this episode at www.seven-health.com/259.

Before we get started, I want to mention that I’m currently taking on new clients. I specialise in helping clients overcome eating disorders and disordered eating, chronic dieting, body dissatisfaction and poor body image, exercise compulsion and overexercising, and also helping clients to regain their periods. If you want help with any of these areas or you simply want support in improving your relationship with food and body and exercise, then please get in contact. You can head over to www.seven-health.com/help, and there you can read about how I work with clients and apply for a free initial chat. The address, again, is www.seven-health.com/help, and I’ve also included that in the show notes.

Hey, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Real Health Radio. I’m your host, Chris Sandel. I’m a nutritionist who specialises in recovery from disordered eating and eating disorders, or really just helping anyone who has a messy relationship with food and body and exercise.

This week on the show, it is a solo episode. I’m actually doing a second edition episode. I haven’t done one of these for a while. For anyone new to the podcast, a second edition is where I go back and update an earlier episode. Much like a book has a second edition update, it’s based on new information from research or changes in my perspective.

The episode that is receiving the treatment today is ‘My Over Eating Experiment’. This is actually my most listened to podcast of all time, and by quite some margin. Despite being released back in 2016, it still consistently does well. It was first released as Episode 40 of the show back in May 2016, so a bit over six years ago, and considering that amount of time, there is plenty I’ve changed my thinking on.

With other second edition episodes, I’ve simply left up the original podcast, but for this one, I’m actually going to be replacing it. So for anyone going to the original Episode 40, they’re now going to get this updated version – because otherwise, because of the way that search works, the old episode will be the one that people are mostly going to and will be continuing to listen to, and I don’t want that to happen.

A big part of this is because of how much I disagree with parts of the content in the original episode. There were sections that talked about weight loss in a way that I would never talk about it now. There were comments about healthy versus unhealthy food in a way that I’d never talk about it now. So considering how much I disagree with whole sections of the original podcast and that it’s the updated version that I want people to listen to, I have now removed that old episode.

As a warning, this show contains talk about calories and weight figures, and there is also mention of exercise habits that I was keeping up at the time of the experiment because it’s me reflecting on an overeating experiment where I tracked my food and my weight and my movement and exercise. I have wrestled with this and thought about if I could talk about this experiment without including these numbers, but because this is an experiment and the basis for the findings of the experiment are connected to weight and calories, I really couldn’t figure out a way to talk about this without including that information.

I’m very aware of how numbers like this can be triggering, so I want to mention this up front so that if this is going to be triggering for you, you can turn it off now. I have stripped back a lot of this compared to how it was in the original episode, and being able to convey what happened but without the unnecessary level of detail from the first edition.

I’ve actually been wanting to do a second edition of this episode for years. I actually looked back and created a Word document back in September 2020 when I first attempted to do this second edition, and I’d known even before that for a while that I wanted to do it. But I kept getting stumped with it, and particularly because of the mention of calories and weight and exercise and how triggering I know this can be.

But despite this, I do still believe that there is value in me doing this experiment and being able to talk about it, and hopefully this updated version will be of use. So let’s get on with it.

00:04:55

Background of the experiment

I don’t think it is hyperbole to say that our world is obsessed with weight loss. If there’s one phrase that has been uttered more than any other, it’s to ‘eat less and move more’. It’s a mantra that’s been uttered so many times, it’s just become part of our everyday rhetoric. While calories and exercise can have an impact on someone’s weight, it’s nowhere near as straight forward as it’s made out.

Personally, I’m someone who has a natural propensity to not put on weight. My weight may move up and down, but this is in a band of a handful of kilos, and it rarely moves out of this band. This is known as the weight set point and is actually an idea I explored in much more detail in Episode 114 of the podcast, which I’ll link to in the show notes. The weight set point episode came out in March 2018, and I’d also like to do a second edition of it at some point, but you can listen to that.

Leading up to the overeating experiment, I was thinking about and reflecting on my own eating. I tend to think of myself as a big eater, but I started to ask myself if this was really the case. Do I have big days or big meals that stick out in my mind, but otherwise, my eating is on the lower side? Or do I genuinely eat a lot of food and my weight is just steady?

Thankfully, I’m not someone who tracks their calories. I’ve done it at certain points in the past, but never for a long period of time. So it was hard to quantify exactly how much I ate because I never really paid that close attention to it. I’d eat when I was hungry, I stopped when I was full – at least most of the time. But in terms of actual figures, I really couldn’t tell you.

So I decided to set myself a challenge. This started on the 25th of January, 2016, and for a period of 12 weeks, I was going to eat 3,200 calories a day, every day, as a minimum. If I was hungry, I could eat more, and there would be days where I would see just how much I could fit in if I really tried. In the end, the experiment only lasted 9 weeks instead of 12 weeks, but I’ll explain why when we get to it.

As part of this show, I want to talk about the experiment and how it impacted my weight. I’m then going to use this as a launchpad to talk about our misunderstanding around calories in and calories out and the ‘move more and eat less’ and how it’s not as simple as it’s all made out to be.

00:07:38

Daily calories + exercise during the experiment

A bit of background on the experiment and why I picked 3,200 calories. I wanted to go for a figure that was well above my daily requirements, which I’ll cover in a bit, but that I could also keep up. Most people can have a big day of eating, and there are probably days in my everyday life where I do hit 4,000 or 4,500 calories, but there’s a difference between that in terms of having one big day and then actually keeping this up consistently. Typically, if I’ve had a big day of eating, the next day I’m not so hungry, or if I’m on holiday, I can eat lots of food for the first two or three days, but as time goes on the novelty drops down and so does the hunger.

This isn’t about guilt or being consciously aware of needing to eat less after eating more; my body just naturally regulates itself. So while I wanted to challenge myself, I didn’t want to back myself into a corner where after a week or two, I just couldn’t keep it up.

For about 7 to 10 days before starting the experiment, I started to track my calories and I tried eating a lot and seeing where my calories would come out. On those days, I hit around 3,500 calories or above, but it was a real stretch, and it really didn’t feel doable to do for an extended amount of time. So when I looked at it, 3,200 felt like it would be a fair bit of work, but I was confident that I would be able to keep it up – with the idea that this was then the minimum, and I would try to go above this figure.

In terms of exercise as part of the experiment, I kept doing what I was normally doing at the time. Really, I was just wanting to change the eating side of things but have every other part of my life stay as it was. My normal exercise at the time of the experiment was walking the dog each day, and that was happening for about one to two hours. I was also doing a 1-hour circuits class one to three times a week, but probably one and a half times a week.

I had a half marathon trail run booked in for the April of that year, and I started doing some training for that about halfway through, and this consisted of going for a run on a Saturday and on a handful of occasions, and that ranged from about 10k through to a couple half marathons. I also played golf, but considering the timing of the experiment – it was starting in the dead of winter – it was really wet and muddy, so golf didn’t really happen at all for the first half of the experiment, and then during the second half there was probably a handful of rounds.

It’s funny looking at all this now, some six years on. Having a child has definitely impacted on my life, and it’s been a long time since I’ve consistently exercised at that level. I still play golf, but I don’t go to the gym or do circuits class. Rox, my dog, is now 12 years old, and age has really caught up with her. So most days we’ll walk for about 10 to 20 minutes, but that’s all she’s up for. There’s no 1-2 hours.

This is something I’m reflecting on now as I look back on this experiment – just how different my life looked when I was child-free versus being a parent, and just how much more time I had for myself then.

So how did I work out the calorie needs and come up with the daily goal of 3,200? There are quite detailed ways of doing this in a laboratory where you can work out your exact metabolic rate, and other factors would then determine what your calorie demands are. But most people don’t do this. They just go online, they put in some figures around their height and their weight, and see what the site spits out. So I therefore chose to do it this way because this is how nearly everyone does it, and I wanted to see how my figures at the end of the experiment would match up with what the online information was suggesting would happen.

With doing the online version of this, there are two ways of doing it. And there are obviously countless websites, so it’s not just that there are two sites, but what I mean is you can either look at your average weekly and work it out that way, or you can look at it by figuring out each individual day and seeing what would happen on the days where I play golf versus the days I do circuits versus the days I do no movement except walking the dog, and then add all of these separate days together and work out what the average is.

The first way just looks at what is the weekly average. You go to a site, it asks you your height, your weight, your age, your gender, and then asks for your level of activity across a week. The calculator then typically gives you a couple of options in terms of, do you do light exercise, medium exercise, or high amounts? Then it gives you an example of what each of these categories mean. Maybe there’s a question about the physical demand of your job, maybe there isn’t.

I did this on a number of sites, and the figures typically averaged somewhere between 2,650 and 2,750. Some of the sites were as low as 2,300; others were as high as 2,900. So if I take an aveage of all these sites, it worked out as roughly 2,700, which is the estimate of what these sites thought I needed to maintain my current weight, and if I continued to eat 2,700 calories each day, my weight would stay the same.

Then the other way of calculating it is looking at each of the days with the different demands and working out what I need on each of them. There’s a calculator that I’ll link to in the show notes that allows you to do this. It has categories for intense exercise, moderate exercise, light exercise, standing and walking, sitting, and then sleeping. So you can then indicate how much of each of these you do, and it will then give you an estimate of your basal metabolic rate and your total energy expenditure.

I worked all of this out for a couple of weeks on a day by day basis and then averaged it out, and interestingly, even when I went to all this extra work, it came out with figures that were pretty much the same as what I said before. It averaged out at somewhere between 2,700 and 2,800 to maintain my weight, given my daily activity.

So for the experiment, I went with the higher figure in terms of 2,800 as my daily baseline. The fact that I was going to be eating 3,200 calories, this was creating a 400-calorie surplus. So each day, as a minimum, there would be a 400-calorie surplus and it would be more than that if I then went above the 3,200 calories.

With starting the experiment, I started on Monday, the 25th of January, 2016, and at this point I weighed 64.5 kilos or 142 pounds. This was first thing in the morning, straight after walking the dog, which is how I weighed myself the whole time throughout the experiment, which I did every day barring a couple of times when I was away or I forgot.

As I mentioned earlier, for about 7 to 10 days prior to starting the experiment, I was playing around with different calorie figures, and some of the days was eating a lot of food. So realising what was ahead of me for the last couple of days before I actually started, I lowered my calories. I wouldn’t say I was heavily restricting, but I was intentionally eating lighter meals because I knew what I was about to be starting.

For the week prior to the experiment, my weight was somewhere between 65 and 65.7 kilos or 143 to 145 pounds, and then it just dropped down the last couple of days before starting, so it was at 64.5 or 142 on the day I started.

I want to add that I’m only using my weight here because it is relevant to the experiment. As I’ll talk about later, what I weigh is mostly dumb luck. There is nothing that the number actually says about me as a person or anything along those lines.

I’m going to talk about my weight and what happened during the experiment in a moment, but first I want to mention some of the other things that I noticed as I went through the experiment.

00:16:50

How the kinds of food I ate shifted during the experiment

To start with, I was mostly eating in a way that I usually did – just having bigger portions of my usual way of eating. This was a lot of homecooked food, but eating this way then became tough to get in the number of calories that I needed. And yes, I could do it on some days and I could do it early on in the experiment, but it was then getting very filling when I was trying to increase my amounts, as before the experiment started I was already used to eating to a point of comfortable fullness with my meals. So to add further of what I was already eating, I was very much knocking up against fullness pretty quickly.

So I started originally eating more chocolate to help get up the calories, or having different Gu puddings for dessert. For listeners in the UK, they might know what the Gu products are. But as the experiment went on, the kinds of food I ate started to shift. I was waking up feeling absolutely stuffed, and every day was a real struggle to get in the food. So any kind of vegetables, like broccoli and cauliflower and peppers and cucumber and carrots and celery and kale, all those aboveground vegetables, low-calorie vegetables, just disappeared from my diet because they take up too much room for what I was trying to do.

With more and more time, food shifted much more towards really calorie-dense foods or ready meals that would then take up less space in my stomach for the number of calories they provided. So I started having more frozen pizzas and ready meals. For those in the UK, the Charlie Bigham ready meals are delicious and I still eat them now. On the pack, it says it’s meant to be for two people, but even now, outside of doing the experiment, I will very happily eat one to myself. So if I was having one of these to myself and then I could add in some dessert and some wine, I could be hitting 1,500 to 1,800 calories in one meal.

I did become really strategic with my eating. I initially started out trying to have three meals and then a number of snacks, like a mid-morning snack and a mid-afternoon snack and a snack in the evening – and again, this is similar to how I ate before the experiment and similar to how I eat now – and this worked for a while. But I then just couldn’t stomach eating so often when I was so full all the time.

So I changed to having just three meals a day and maybe some chocolate or dessert at some point throughout the day, and I would then try and leave much longer gaps between my meals to just get a minor semblance of hunger, and then I would eat.

Towards the end, I started to try and have three meals but where I’d have one of those be a really big meal. So if I could hit 1,400 or 1,600 or 1,800 calories in a meal, it would then take some of the pressure off for the other meals and I could get there.

In terms of macronutrients, this stuff also started to shift a bit throughout the experiment. I normally eat quite a lot of carbohydrates, and this probably accounts for 50% of my calories. Again, calories and macronutrients are not something I really track, but it would be similar in that range. But as the experiment went on, this percentage dropped down. It was more around 35% to 40% instead of around 50%. For me to increase my calories, it was just so much easier for me to up my fat percentage. This was mostly from added fat. My eggs in the morning, I would add a much larger chunk of butter. Or if I was having rice or pasta, I would add a much larger glug of oil or a much larger chunk of butter again. I’m already very liberal with my fat usage, and I was just much more liberal to really increase things.

I was really conscious when I started the experiment that I wanted to have a real mix of eating. I didn’t want the results to be skewed or for people to say the results were skewed because I was eating high carb or I was eating low carb or I was eating high fat or low fat, or that it was because I was eating whole foods. So really, I wanted to eat the whole gamut of foods as part of this experiment.

In fact, on the second last day of the experiment, I went out for breakfast at a café and had French toast with banana and bacon and tons of maple syrup, and then for lunch I had KFC, and then for dinner I had McDonald’s, and I hit 3,800 calories on that day.

00:21:50

Why my water + alcohol intake increased

I also had to up my water intake. Eating so much food just made me much thirstier, and it increased my need for water. It kind of took me a while to realise this and that I needed to change it; I was having that really dark urination in the afternoon and the early evening, so I upped my fluid intake.

I also started having more alcohol, and this was to up my calories. I’m not that big a drinker normally, but as the experiment went on, I was having a glass of wine most nights because it would then add an extra 200 calories per glass. There was also a number of really boozy days in an attempt to really get my calories up. For one day, I hit just over 4,500 calories, and 1,000 of that came from having four pints of Guinness. And then on another day, I was just shy of 4,900 calories, and 1,400 calories were due to a bottle of wine and three pints of Guinness.

Interestingly – and this isn’t something I included in the original episode – all this eating and alcohol led to me developing gout. Gout is an inflammatory type of arthritis, and it can affect different parts of the body, but especially the big toe. I started to notice toward the end of the experiment that I was getting pain in my big toe, and this was especially if I was drinking, it was especially at nighttime. This actually continued well after the experiment. Probably for about 12 months, around a year, I would experience pain in my toe if I drank alcohol, or if it was hot and I got a bit dehydrated, or if I had a really heavy meal. I don’t remember exactly when it stopped, but it did really last a long time, and it was excruciatingly painful.

00:23:54

Why the experiment was harder than you may think

One thing I want to stress is just how hard this really was. You may be listening and thinking this sounds amazing and you’d love to be able to do it – and maybe you could do it for a couple of days. But as time goes on, the novelty wears off. Constantly feeling so full, knowing that it was 5 p.m. and I still needed to get in another 1,600 calories, it really sucked.

And even if you forget about the calories for a minute – because there are probably some people who think that 3,200 calories is a large amount of food and others who think this is just what they normally eat so it’s fine – but for the experiment, I significantly ate more than I ever had in my life, and I was keeping it up consistently. I was eating well past the point of fullness and not being able to eat another mouthful, and doing this meal after meal, day after day.

I actually reached a strange point of having moments of being hungry but full at the same time. I wouldn’t have eaten for six or seven hours, and there was some kind of hunger sensation, but at the same time food was still sitting really heavy, and I had this overwhelming feeling of fullness, so it was this very mixed signal.

For a long time now, I’ve worked with clients going through eating disorder recovery and having to go through nutritional rehabilitation, and while some have points of experiencing extreme hunger and where it’s physically easy to eat a lot of food, often this isn’t the case. They’re eating where it’s leading to discomfort or food is passing through really slowly, and they’re having to start their next meal or their next snack while they still feel full from the last one. So this experiment has really given me a sense, at least from a physical standpoint, of what it’s like and how hard this is to do day after day.

Because of the fullness, after the first or second week, I started taking digestive enzymes and HCl tablets. I was typically worse in the morning time, and I’d finish breakfast and be walking the dog and have this really strong feeling of nausea. The tablets helped a little bit, and this is something that I’ll sometimes recommend with clients and they will find they can be helpful, but I think it is probably a bit of an uphill battle considering how much food I was putting in each day and how much this was having an impact on my digestion. There’s no amount of HCl tablets or enzymes that was able to manage that.

While the overeating experiment was initially meant to last for 12 weeks, in the end I could only manage 9. I was about 2 weeks in when I realised just how much it was sucking, and I decided at that point that I would make it 10 weeks instead of 12, but it was then towards the end of the eighth week where I realised I just could not keep it up for another 2 weeks and decided to just do it for 9 weeks.

00:27:03

Symptoms during the experiment

In terms of changes in symptoms over the experiment, apart from the fullness that I’ve talked about and the gout that was occurring towards the end, there wasn’t huge changes. I was definitely warmer while doing the experiment. I wasn’t taking my body temperature, but I was wearing less clothes. The kitchen in the house I was living in at the time was normally pretty cold, which was lovely in the summer but not so much in the wintertime, but even in the winter when I was doing this experiment, I was finding that I’d be doing the cooking in the morning in bare feet on the cold tile floor and really enjoying the cooling feeling.

My sleep probably wasn’t as good throughout the experiment, although there were different things that were going on, so it’s hard to say if this was the food or if it was for other reasons. And my sleep was just a little more broken, and there were definitely nights where I would go to bed and it took me a while to fall asleep, but that was because I was just so full and uncomfortable with it.

Stools-wise, things probably got a little looser. And while in some sense it felt like things were sitting heavy and were blocked up, in other ways it felt like my transit time really decreased, and the body was just trying to get things moving along and moving out. So my frequency also increased. I was probably going three to five times a day compared to my usual two or three times a day.

My mood probably wasn’t as good throughout the experiment because of the overwhelming feeling of fullness and the knowledge that I had to eat again shortly. There would be days where I’d be hungry and things were fine, but there’d be other days where I’d be so full, and that was really tough. I remember Ali commenting on how much she was looking forward to it being over so I could stop complaining about how full I was feeling. I definitely had times of feeling irritated or annoyed and just resenting the fact that I had to keep this up, but that wasn’t all the time.

00:29:07

Results: Calories consumed + weight changes

As I mentioned, I had a goal of hitting 3,200 calories a day, and despite this goal, it didn’t happen every day. Normally there would be one day a week where I would be under. Towards the end, there were some weeks where I’d be under on two of the days. And some days it was just I didn’t calculate my last meal before going to bed and I thought I’d eaten more than I had, only to discover the next day that I was under. But as the experiment went on, the days where I was below was because I was just so stuffed and I couldn’t eat any more.

But what I would add is that I was regularly above the 3,200 figure. Sometimes it might be a little, so 3,300 or 3,600, and other days it was significantly above this, where I was above 4,000 or close to eating 4,500. When I work out the average across the whole experiment, my daily average was 3,347 calories, so nearly 150 calories above what the original target was and nearly 550 above what it’s estimated I need in a day.

If we go back to the original calculations that I did at the start and I estimated that I needed, 2,800 calories per day, over that 9-week period I consumed an extra 34,446 calories on top of what the online calculators estimated that I need.

The figure that is always talked about is that a pound of fat is equivalent to 3,500 extra calories. So if you eat 3,500 extra calories, you should put on a pound; if you remove 3,500 calories, you should lose a pound. I obviously disagree with this complete oversimplification of weight gain and weight loss, but I’m using this figure here because it is so ubiquitous in its use and how it’s talked about.

This means that with the extra 34,000 odd calories that I ate, this should’ve led to an increase in my weight of 9.85 pounds or just shy of 4.5 kilos. Again, this math is flawed because as extra weight goes on, the body now needs a little higher amount of calories to maintain this new weight, but it would be in that ballpark based on what online figures suggest. With this in mind, let’s look at what happened as part of the experiment with my weight.

As I mentioned earlier, on the morning of the first day of the experiment, I was sitting at 64.5 kilos or 142.2 pounds. At the end of the first week – this is the Monday morning of Week 2 – I was sitting at 65 kilos or 143.3 pounds. So I’d put on half a kilo or 1.1 pounds. During that week, I’d eaten an extra 4,286 calories. So if 3,500 calories is meant to lead to a 1-pound increase, in my case it took 4,286 to lead to a 1.1-pound increase.

Then at the end of Week 2, my weight had gone up to 65.7 kilos or just shy of 144.8, and I had eaten an extra 3,835 calories over what it’s estimated I needed, and that had then led to an increase of 0.7 kilos or 1.5 pounds.

Week 3 was an interesting one. Despite the fact that I ate an extra 3,928 calories above what I supposedly need, my weight actually came down during that week. I finished up that Week 3 at 65.5 kilos or 144.4 pounds, so I lost 0.2 of a kilo or 0.4 of a pound despite all of the extra calories.

Week 4 went back to what would be predicted, and my weight went up again. I finished that week at 66.1 kilos or 145.7 pounds. This was an increase of 0.6 kilos or 1.1 pounds. And during this week, I ate an extra 4,378 calories. So again, if it’s meant to be 3,500 calories to increase an extra pound, for me it’s a lot more than this.

For Week 5, this was my biggest weight gain week and also my biggest week of eating. I ate an extra 5,381 calories above what it’s estimated I needed, and at the end of Week 5 I weighed 66.9 or 147.4 pounds. This was an increase of 0.8 of a kilo or 1.9 pounds.

Week 6 was then where I reached my highest weight, albeit only marginally more than the week before. I finished Week 6 at 67 kilos or 147.7 pounds, and despite eating an extra 3,959 calories this week, I only put on an extra 0.1 of a kilo or 0.2 of a pound.

But from Week 7 onwards, despite continuing to eat significantly more than I need and eating to the point of feeling ill, my weight began to drop. At the end of Week 7, my weight was down to 66.2 kilos or 145.9 pounds. Despite the fact that I’d eaten an extra 3,934 calories on top of what I need, I lost 0.8 of a kilo or 1.8 pounds.

Then the last 2 weeks, I really struggled to keep the calories up. It was much more erratic. There were days where I could only manage 2,300 calories because I was so full, although the previous two days I’d eaten 3,800 calories. I knew that the end was in sight, and I was just doing my best to keep the experiment going.

At the end of Week 8, my weight was 66.1 kilos or 145.7 pounds, so I dropped a tiny amount, coming down 0.1 of a kilo or 0.2 of a pound. During that week, I had an extra 2,709 calories above what I need. Nowhere near the heady heights of 5,381 calories in Week 5, but it’s still a lot of food and still a lot more than it’s suggested I needed.

Then at the end of Week 9 and the end of the experiment, my weight had come down further. I finished up on the final Monday weighing 65.7 kilos or 144.8 pounds. This was then a further drop over that week of 0.4 of a kilo or 0.9 of a pound. During that week, I ate an extra 2,586 calories above what it’s estimated I needed. This was the lowest of all the weeks, but again, it was still well above what the estimates are that I need.

So after 9 weeks of eating as much as I possibly could, I ended the experiment only 1.2 kilos or 2.6 pounds heavier than where I started. So all of that extra 34,446 calories above what I apparently needed only led to a small increase in my weight of 1.2 kilos or 2.6 pounds.

00:37:18

How the experiment affected my relationship to food, hunger, body image

I cannot tell you how pleased I was when it was all over. For the last couple of days prior to it ending, I actually started to fantasize about doing a fast. I didn’t do one, and I’m not endorsing or recommending one, but after being so full for so long, this was my mental state and how I felt. It kind of reminded me of the Minnesota Starvation Experiment but in reverse. In the Minnesota Starvation Experiment, the participants started dreaming about cookbooks and about being chefs and restaurant owners. They spent their time reading cookbooks and staying up till five in the morning flipping through these things and just wanted to get their hands on anything related to food. But because I’d been full for so long, I started having the opposite fantasy of just not eating.

I’ve actually done three podcast episodes on the Minnesota Starvation Experiment, and the most recent one was a second edition. I will link to those in the show notes, and if you haven’t heard about this experiment before or you’ve heard about it but you don’t know a lot of the details, then I would highly suggest checking it out.

For the first couple of days after the experiment, my eating was pretty light. It was more salads, it was more vegetables, it was more all the foods that I had been avoiding because they’d been too low-calorie for the experiment. It actually took a little while for my hunger gauge to come back. As I mentioned earlier, I regularly had this feeling of fullness and hunger at the same time, or fullness all the time with small moments of noticing something resembling hunger.

Now that I didn’t have to override this feeling to get my calories up, it left me in this weird limbo land. It probably took about 2 or maybe 3 weeks for this to fully disappear, and this was after only doing an experiment for 9 weeks. I think this is really interesting to remember, especially given the clients that I work with who struggle with interoceptive awareness and hearing feedback from their body connected to hunger and fullness and satisfaction and those kind of feedback. But this comes for them from a place of dieting and restriction, possibly followed by binging and purging. Rather than this being something that’s occurred for a matter of weeks, this has gone on for years or even decades, and possibly since the age of six or seven, they’ve been restricting their food and ignoring hunger signals.

So when someone is then suggested to tune in to their body signals and their interoceptive awareness, the response, rather unsurprisingly, is “I have no idea what it is saying.” And I totally get this. If I can experience, after a short amount of time, in 9 weeks, that this feedback starts to get a little bit blurry and hard to recognise, then of course they’re going to experience this, as for a large percentage of their adult life and even their child life, they have been dieting or restricting and doing things that have ignored the connection with the feedback from the body.

But as I experienced, it does go away, and for these clients, it’s not going to be in 2 or 3 weeks, but it is a learnable skill. With enough time and the body getting into a different state, it does come back.

I was also pretty surprised at how the experiment started to affect my body image and my thought about weight. This was actually more of an issue when the experiment was over, more than anything. The week after I stopped the experiment, my weight started to come down, which is no real surprise. But what was strange was then after about three days of it decreasing, it then started to go up again, despite eating less in comparison to what I was doing during the experiment – eating a lot less.

After five days of eating much less, I was actually slightly heavier than when the experiment ended. By the end of Week 1 after the experiment ended, I was at 65.3 kilos or 144 pounds, which is only a tiny drop from where I finished the experiment. Then at the end of Week 2 after the experiment, there’d also been no further change.

While I had no right to be frustrated, the fact that my weight wasn’t going down started to really annoy me. Getting on the scale each morning became an unpleasant experience. And I am someone who has good body image and realises that the difference between my weight at the start of the experiment and at the end of the experiment made absolutely no difference to my health or to my appearance, but for some reason this hyper-analysing of my weight and the fact that I’d been doing this for such a long time through the experiment and having my weight not do what I was expecting it to do at that point really started to get to me.

So to remedy this, I just stopped weighing myself on a daily basis, and instead I would do it once a week or twice a week. This change worked well, and the small amounts of frustration I was experiencing started to go away.

It’s actually interesting commenting on this now, over six years on since doing the experiment, because I had completely forgotten about this. If I hadn’t had this written down somewhere and had the ability to reread it, I wouldn’t have remembered this was what had happened. A good reminder, if ever I needed one, of how fallible our memory is.

From Week 3 onwards, my weight did come down, and it started to do so fairly consistently. At the time of recording the first edition of the podcast, which was 7 weeks after the experiment was over, I was at 63.4 kilos or 139.7 pounds, which was then 1.1 kilos or 2.4 pounds lighter than when I started the experiment. This was still very much in my usual weight set point range, so it wasn’t strange for me to have dropped down there. It’s usually at the lower end of the range in spring and summertime, and this was the point of the year that I was in.

00:44:03

Reflections on weight set point + body diversity

So that is the experiment. Using it as background, I want to talk about weight, and weight in a more general sense than just what happened with me.

To start with, I’m under no illusions that I am an anomaly sitting at the far end of the spectrum when it comes to putting on weight and the difficulty with putting on weight. Not for a minute am I suggesting that if everyone did this experiment, they would get similar results. I think someone’s weight and where their body chooses to be is on a spectrum, and while I may be at one end of the spectrum, there can be and are people who can experience the exact opposite of what I did. They can go on a diet where their calories are cut and they do so rather drastically, and they keep this up for 9 weeks, and despite the apparently huge calorie deficit, what they actually lose ends up being a tiny amount in comparison to what would be estimated via an online calculator.

In my recent conversation with Bri Campos, which is Episode 257 of the podcast, she talked about this – that she was an incredibly disciplined dieter, but no matter what she did, there was very little weight that was lost.

Just like I had to use an inordinate amount of willpower to keep myself eating despite my body’s best efforts to get me to stop, someone can experience the same thing but in the opposite direction: they are hungry all the time, to the point of it becoming all-consuming. At some point they can’t take it any longer, like I did, and they return to eating in a way that feels more right for their body. Within a short amount of time, they are back to where they started, and then maybe a couple weeks later, they are now heavier than when they started. Despite a monumental effort doing exactly what most people are told to do to lose weight, it doesn’t result in the outcome they expected.

Part of the reason for this is due to weight set point theory. Set point theory is the idea that the body naturally and automatically controls your weight, and it suggests that your body has an ideal weight range and it likes to keep you between this, and the range is often estimated around about 10% of your body weight. Most people will fluctuate up and down within this range on a regular basis; however, moving out of this range is much more difficult. Again, this is something I covered in real detail in my podcast on this, and it’s Episode 114.

This range changes over time. Where your body wants to be is different when you’re a child versus while going through puberty versus as an adult, then going through menopause, then in old age. I think this change is important to remember, because as I talked about in my podcast with Fiona Willer, which is Episode 225, during puberty we have a growth spurt and we have a height spurt, but those don’t necessarily happen at the same time. It makes biological sense that the body would put on weight first before the height increases, and this is what happens for many people.

Or, as I talked about with Michelle Viña-Baltsas, which is Episode 251 of the podcast, weight gain is natural and common leading up to and during menopause. This isn’t something to be feared or guarded against but is a natural biological process.

Even when I reflect on my own body now versus when I did this experiment, it has definitely changed. My weight set point is higher than it used to be. I’m no longer as lean or as thin as I was. And I can come up with many explanations for why this is. I commented earlier that I don’t do as much exercise as I used to; I now have a child and have to deal with all the joys and challenges that this brings up. We haven’t had an easy time in parenthood, although I’m well aware that no-one does, but it does feel like we’ve been at the more challenging end of things. Ali has had many health challenges throughout this time. We’ve had financial challenges. We’ve worked with therapists for ourselves, for our son. Life is simply much more complicated than it used to be, so it could be easy to chalk my change in set point up to all of this.

But the reality is, I don’t know. Maybe this was going to happen at this stage of life, and these events are simply correlated with this and aren’t actually causative. All I know is that my weight set point is higher now than it was six years ago, and that is completely okay.

But as I saw with my overeating experiment, and has been shown in experiments in both starvation and with overfeeding, the body will fight to get back to its ideal weight, and if provided with what it needs to do this, it will happen naturally. I honestly don’t think I ever moved outside of my natural range during this experiment. I bumped up against the top level of it, and I did everything in my power to move out of that, but it did everything in its power to move me back down. That was what happened during the latter part of the experiment. When I then returned to my normal way of eating, my weight dropped down to the lower end of the range, which it often sat at.

Body diversity is a real thing. Even though it’s not what we’re exposed to in the media on a daily basis, I think it is highly unrealistic that we believe that everyone can get to a size 6 or a size 8 UK size, or 2 or 4 US size, or that everyone should be in the supposedly ‘normal’ BMI range.

I’m very conscious of the privilege that I receive in this society, all due to things that I’ve done nothing to warrant. I’m male, I’m white, I’m middle class, I’m thin. And in my life, there are things that I do keep up that probably have some impact on my weight. In my normal life, I do most of my own cooking with fresh ingredients. I get regular exercise or movement. I spend a good amount of time outdoors and in nature. I go to bed early and get plenty of sleep. I have good self-care, and on the whole manage my stress well. I have happy and supportive relationships. I have good self-esteem and feel very autonomous in my life and the decisions that I make.

All of these can undoubtedly have some impact on my weight, but the vast majority of it is just dumb luck. This is just the way that I am and the privileges that I come with, and equally, there are people who have all of these attributes in their life that I just described and are in a larger, even much larger, body than I am. So how much of this is the reality about the choices I make compared to just genetics of where my body wants to be, and all these things are just simply correlated with it?

00:51:43

What if I lived in a society that valued fatness?

I often think about how it would be if I lived in a different society – one that favoured or valued fatness instead of thinness. If the standards of beauty that society was pushing was someone in a much larger body. In that kind of society, I would be screwed. The likelihood of me getting to that place based on this experiment is slim to none. And imagine how people would talk about my weight; I would be told I was lazy, that I lacked willpower, that I obviously didn’t care about my health.

Maybe I could try and increase my weight by starting to change other things, like maybe I could stop exercising, maybe I could go to bed later and mess with my circadian rhythm in an attempt to increase my weight. Maybe I could start eating different foods where I wasn’t responding to what I was craving or what made me feel better but was simply about what would help me gain weight. Maybe I could start having more alcohol, or just attempt other things that would increase my weight.

But the problem with this is that even if I did put on weight in this mystical world where this was valued and I’m being complimented, my health is now starting to suffer. I’m also becoming disconnected from my body, ignoring what it needs and simply making choices that will increase my weight – which is where so much of society finds themselves today, making choices to diet and making lifestyle choices with this myopic focus on weight loss, and often under the guise of improved health.

But I also understand why people do it. We live in a society that equates thinness with health and thinness with willpower and morality and virtue. Or if someone is in a larger body, if they’re seen to be trying to shrink this body, this is seen as a good behaviour. Weight stigma and fatphobia are real and they’re rampant in our society, so it makes sense why someone would believe that they should prioritise weight loss.

But despite diet culture and the beliefs about thinness and fatness, this doesn’t change the reality of physiology and that the body has a set point that it will fight to keep us in. When we look at weight and health, these two aren’t connected in the way that is often made out – that if you’re thin, you’re healthy, and if you’re fat, you’re unhealthy.

This is a topic that I’ve covered in so many other podcasts, so I’m not going to repeat it here, but I will link to a number of episodes in the show notes. They include Episode 225 with Fiona Willer, 241 with Ragen Chastain, 224 with Jon Robison. I’ve also done a solo episode looking at the complexity of health, which is Episode 183. Or I did an episode on health inequalities and looking at the Marmot Report in the UK. This covers the social determinants of health, which is Episode 209. I’ve also done an episode with Jeffrey Hunger all about weight stigma and the health problems this causes, and it’s Episode 186.

These are all episodes that can show that health and weight are not connected in the simple way that they are made out.

00:55:14

Do I believe in calories in vs calories out?

A legitimate question, then, based on my overeating experiment, is do I believe in calories in versus calories out? The answer to this question is yes and no.

Calories clearly matter and can have an impact on one’s weight, but it’s nowhere near as simple as it’s made out and the supposed logical leap of if calories in versus calories out is true, then the advice should be to just eat less and move more. Again, I don’t think this is true, whether we’re talking about long-term changing in someone’s weight or in changing someone’s health.

I think it would be useful to spend a bit of time looking at calories in and calories out because it is something that people are confused about. It will also show why some of the figures that I’d been using in terms of the calories I consumed, as well as the calories you think you are eating, may be much less accurate than you believe.

Some of the information for this has come from a couple of articles by Precision Nutrition and an article by Gizmodo, all of which I will link to in the show notes, and some of it also comes from the episode I did on weight set point, which again, I’ll link to in the show notes.

00:56:34

Why ‘calories in’ isn’t straight forward

Let’s start with the calories in part of the equation. People think this is easy and straight forward, that it is just the food that you eat, and by looking up the calories of everything you eat, like I did in the experiment, you can know the exact calorie figures. But this is flawed for a number of reasons.

The first is that calorie figures are very imprecise. For every potato that weighs 120 grams, it doesn’t contain the exact same amount of carbs and protein and fat. Every chicken breast of 200 grams doesn’t contain the same amount of carbs, protein, and fat. Individual foods vary, and this can be quite significant. The variety of food, the growing conditions, the type of soil or the temperature, when the food was picked or what the animal was fed and what age it was killed – all of these plus a multitude of other factors can affect the energy contained within a food.

So the figures that appear online or in a tracking software or even on the back of a packet are often standard figures that may or may not match up to what the food really contains. And the error rate for this can be as high as 50%.

To put this in real terms, a 6-ounce steak could contain 323 calories at the low end or 506 calories at the high end. Or a large sweet potato could contain 231 calories at the low end or 705 calories at the high end. The Gizmodo article does a great job at explaining the history of all this stuff and how we came to these standardized numbers, which I, at least, found interesting.

The next part of the ‘calories in’ equation to remember is that we don’t absorb all the calories that are in a food. Some of this can come down to the individual and things like stomach acidity or the level of different pancreatic enzymes or gut bacteria. And some of it’s down to the fact that no matter how good someone’s digestion is, part of the food they are consuming is just not going to be digested. Some of this is fibre and some of this is just the hardness of the food, for example with things like nuts.

In my experience through this experiment, it definitely felt like I was digesting less food as the time went on. It was like my body was just trying to get things through and out, and the absorption and digestion was less effective due to the increased speed of transit time.

To give you an idea of how much, say, our gut bacteria can affect weight, let me give two examples. One was research looking at a set of twins; one of them was lean and the other one was obese. I’m going to be using that term because this is how it was written in the paper. They took gut microbes from each of these twins and inserted them into mice. The mouse that received the microbes from the obese twin gained weight; the mouse that received the microbes from the lean twin remained lean. This was despite the fact that the eating was the exact same. This change was due to the number of calories that were absorbed, or possibly some other mechanism, because the calories in remained the same.

Another example is a lady who received a transplant of gut microbes from her daughter to treat an intestinal infection. The transplant was a success in treating the infection, but since the transplant, the lady gained more than 40 pounds, which she was then unable to shed through dieting and exercise. The only thing that had changed were her gut microbes. I know that is very anecdotal. It is, and it isn’t part of a double-blind study, but these changes in her microbes had an impact on the amount of calories that she was absorbing, the ‘calories in’ figure.

How our food is prepared can also affect the number of calories that are available for digestion. There is a fascinating book called Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human by Richard Wrangham. I read it many years ago, but it’s also referenced in the Gizmodo article. The premise of the book is that the big thing that allowed us to become humans that we are today is cooking because cooking breaks down the tough parts of meat and plants, and it makes calories more readily available. This meant instead of spending hours and hours a day eating and chewing and digesting fibrous foods, we were able to get all our calories much easier, allowing us to grow bigger brains, but also have the time to do other things that helped us to advance.

So cooking a food can massively affect the food’s available calories, and often this just isn’t estimated correctly when looking at online figures. The difference between eating vegetables that are raw versus lightly steamed versus boiled versus blended into a soup can be quite significant. And if you multiply this across many meals a day, this difference can add up.

When we combine all of these things together, it makes the ‘calories in’ side of the equation not so accurate. With the figures that I was mentioning earlier, these are my best guesses, but with all this stuff taken into account, you can now see that there is a fairly significant margin for error. But as I mentioned earlier, even if I forget these figures, I know personally I couldn’t have eaten any more than I did. So even if I have wildly overestimated, this also means that my body reaches its state of fullness much sooner, meaning that my ability to maintain the weight that I do isn’t because of willpower but because of my body’s in-built functionality that tells me to stop eating.

01:02:50

Why ‘calories out’ isn’t straight forward

Now I’ve poked some holes in the ‘calories in’ side of things, let’s have a look at the ‘calories out’ side. When people think about ‘calories out’ of the equation, they really just think about exercise, but exercise is only part of it.

The first part of the ‘calories out’ figure is resting metabolic rate. This is what your body uses each day in maintaining your basic bodily functions such as breathing, circulating blood, and growing and repairing cells. I often describe this with people as what you would need if you were in a coma. This figure depends on your weight, your body composition, your sex, your age, your genetic predisposition, possibly the bacterial population of your gut. There are many things that affect this.

Metabolic rate can vary up to 15% from person to person. So despite no more or less effort, someone could need to add or avoid a couple hundred calories a day just to maintain the same weight.

One of the big things that can affect metabolic rate is dieting, which reduces metabolic rate. This can be quite significant. For example, you could have someone who, for all their adult life, has maintained their current weight – not through dieting or intentional modulation of their diet, but simply by living and responding to their hunger and fullness cues. This person may need to eat 2,500 calories a day, and if they do this, things are steady. It’s not that this is the exact calorie figure they eat each day. Some days it’s more, some days it’s less, but over a week or over a month, this is where they average out, and their calories in and calories out are in balance.

You then have someone who was previously much heavier but has now dieted themselves down to that same weight as the first person. But in their case, because of the dieting and the effect it has on their metabolic rate, they have to stick to 2,000 calories a day to maintain this weight. So you have two people who weigh the same, but one has to eat 500 calories less each day just to maintain it.

There was a fantastic article by Gina Kolata in the New York Times looking at past participants of The Biggest Loser and how so many of them struggle to keep their weight off, or basically all of them struggle to keep their weight off. She looked at the metabolic rate and how much this had been reduced. Even though it was six years after The Biggest Loser, their metabolic rates had never recovered and were still much lower.

The next component of the ‘calories out’ figure is the thermic effect of eating. Digesting your food actually uses up some of the calories, and this digesting can typically represent 5% to 10% of the ‘calories out’ figure. But not all foods are created equal. In general, you’ll burn more calories in your effort to digest and absorb protein, so 20% to 30% of its calories. Then carbs, which is 5% to 6% of its calories, and then fats, which is 3%.

But this also doesn’t tell the whole story. For example, fats apparently only need up to 3% of their calories to digest, but if you eat a tablespoon of olive oil, this is going to be very different to eating a handful of nuts, even if the two contain the exact same amount of fat calories. Or the ability to get protein out of a chicken breast will be different to the ability of getting it out of the lentils. So it’s not just the macronutrients that affect digestion, but the type of food.

I would also add that this thermic effect of eating is also affected by the state that the body’s in. Your body has to manage the amount of energy that it has so that it can allocate these resources to all the systems in the body. So if your body is getting less energy than it needs, it has to give less energy to your digestive system. This affects how many calories are used up as part of the digestive process, but also how many of the calories are extracted and absorbed because of the digestion process. Digestion therefore is affecting both sides of the calories in and calories out.

The final two categories of this ‘calories out’ equation relate to movement. The first is known as non-exercise activity thermogenesis, or NEAT. These are all the non-movements that we do during our day. Think of this as the movements that were fundamentally part of our day-to-day life before labour-saving devices, but also just the small movements we have to do as part of being a human being and making our way throughout the world – walking or standing or gardening or washing dishes or hanging out clothes or typing or showering or fidgeting.

Obviously, some of the NEAT is connected to how we intentionally spend our time, like do we spend our time gardening or typing or whatever. But much of it, like fidgeting, is connected to genetics and someone’s propensity to do this, and also where someone is connected to their weight set point can also have an impact.

When people restrict their calorie intake, we see a reduction in NEAT, and this might not happen immediately, but the more someone is trying to push outside of their set point through reduction in energy, the more the body wants to reduce its output. The same happens in the opposite direction. There was a study conducted with the Mayo Clinic, and the researchers overfed 16 normal weight subjects by 1,000 calories per day for 8 weeks, and they asked them not to perform any purposeful exercise. I honestly don’t know how they were able to keep up that kind of overconsumption for 8 weeks, after my experiment.

Despite consuming an extra 1,000 calories a day, what the participants gained varied massively. I think this is a perfect illustration of my own experiment, of how individual our bodies are with weight. It’s the body making the choice of what happens in response to this food. What should’ve happened with an increased calorie amount of this nature, if we are to believe the basic calorie math, is that these subjects should’ve gained about 16 pounds or 7 kilos across this time.

Well, the person who gained the least only gained 0.79 of a pound, or 350 grams. So despite an extra 1,000 calories a day for 8 weeks, they gained less than a pound. And the person who gained the most gained 9.3 pounds or 4.2 kilos, and then everyone else was in between and with quite a spread.

Interestingly, they kept a check on the metabolic rate, on the thermic effect of food, and on physical activity, and while they changed, it wasn’t anything in comparison to what happened with NEAT. For example, the person with the highest change, their NEAT changed by 692 calories a day. Despite being told not to do any physical activity, this person naturally started moving and standing and fidgeting more to the tune of 692 calories a day. This is a huge amount of calories being used by minimal movement. That was the highest, but the average was that NEAT increased by 336 calories per day. This movement, whether we’re talking about NEAT increasing or decreasing, is largely subconscious. This person isn’t actively thinking “I need to move more” or “I need to move less.” This just starts happening.

The final realm of ‘calories out’ is then physical activity. This is exercise in the way that someone would typically think of it – going for a run or a swim or lifting weights or playing tennis or rock climbing or whatever it is. What happens here is the body can push someone towards doing more or less of physical activity.

Or during the time that someone is doing the activity, the body can choose to use more or less energy during the session. Say the body feels like there is an abundance or an excess of energy coming in and you feel energized, so you go for a run. You may find that you can run for a longer period of time. Or during the normal run period, you’re able to run better and do a personal best for your average mile/kilometre per minute time. I know I’m simplifying things here for illustrative purposes, but this is how the body can increase its physical activity output.

The same is true in reverse. You may have a terrible run and feel like stopping early, or you’re much slower and feel like you just don’t have the energy, or the thought of going for a run never even crosses your mind because your body is wanting you to use less.

Let me give an example here of how exercise doesn’t necessarily have the impact that we typically think it would. We would assume that if someone goes from no exercise to exercising regularly, obviously calories out have increased and weight loss will ensue. This was an experiment done by John Berardi from Precision Nutrition. It was done at the University of Texas. They took 100 people; 50 were the subjects, 50 were the control. To start with, these people were all sedentary. The subjects were then given an exercise programme to follow. They went from no exercise to exercising between 5.5 and 6 hours a week. This included three weight sessions and two group interval sessions, and they did this for 12 weeks. The control group, on the other hand, didn’t change anything and continued to be sedentary.

At the end of the 12 weeks, the average weight of the subjects doing the exercise was that they weighed 1 pound more. And no, I didn’t misspeak; they had their weight actually go up. They had lost some fat, about a pound’s worth, and they put on some lean tissue, about 2 pound’s worth, and this accounted for the slight increase in their weight. But for 12 weeks of hard training for 5.5 to 6 hours a week, this is a miniscule change in body composition. For the control subjects, their weight stayed the same.

This goes to show the compensatory mechanisms that are often at play. If you pull one lever down, the body pushes another lever up and vice versa.

Let me go through a couple of other ways that these ‘calories out’ figures can be wrong. I’ve already talked about basal metabolic rate and how dieting can affect this, but really, individuality in the numbers can occur for lots of reasons outside of dieting. Someone’s genetics or epigenetics, the amount of brown fat someone has, the amount of sleep you get, your hormone levels. For example, a woman when she’s in her cycle can affect resting metabolic rate. Metabolic rate actually increases as the cycle goes on and is at its highest about a week before menstruation.

Fitness trackers and exercise machines that tell you how much you use are also notoriously wrong. This margin of error can be anything from about 5% up to about 25%. So if a device says you burnt 300 calories, in reality it could be 260 or it could be 340.

So really, we are pretty terrible at estimating the ‘calories out’ figure, and even if we do think we’re getting it right, the body then changes other parts of the ‘calories out’ equation or other parts of the ‘calories in’ equation, all to help maintain the weight within the current band that it is prioritising. It’s through this mechanism that most people are able to maintain their weight without giving it much thought. It’s not because they’re eating the exact amount of calories each day; it’s because little shifts up and down are matched by the body.

Let me use some figures to put this into perspective. Let’s say that you have a person who needs to eat 2,500 calories a day to maintain their current weight. In two years’ time, they jump on the scale and lo and behold, their weight is the same today as it was two years ago. Over the course of those two years, if they’ve kept up an average of 2,500 calories a day, they’ll have eaten 1,825,000 calories – a pretty significant amount when we put it all together.

Let’s say that instead of 2,500 calories a day, they added in an extra 50 calories a day. This is a tiny amount. It would be something like four or five peanuts or three water crackers or one tablespoon of sugar – something that could easily happen without someone noticing. Over a two-year period, this would account for 36,500 extra calories. Again, if we use the simple but flawed formula of 1 pound equals 3,500 calories, this means an increase of 10.4 pounds or 4.7 kilos over those two years. But despite what this simple math says, most people wouldn’t notice this change, and this is because the body isn’t this static machine but is a living and breathing organism that modulates things based on the feedback that it gets from its environment.

So these tiny increases in calories would create a tiny increase in the amount being used while at the same time increasing satiety. So possibly the next day or the next meal, the calorie figures start to come down, and then the ‘calories out’ figure starts to come down.

I hope this better explains ‘calories in and calories out’ and why it is not the same thing as ‘eat less and move more’. If someone says that a calorie isn’t a calorie, they are correct, because how the body processes it can differ. But this doesn’t invalidate the laws of thermodynamics, and it doesn’t prove that calories in versus calories out isn’t true; it just shows that it is not static, and there are many levers that the body can pull to impact on this balance sheet.

01:17:47

Conclusion

That is the end of this second edition of the podcast. I hope that you have found it useful and informative. A lot has changed in the last six years or so since I did the experiment, which is why I wanted to do this update. The thought of doing the experiment again feels me with dread, so I won’t be repeating it, but I’m really glad that I did do the experiment and that I learnt a lot from it.

Health and weight are not the same thing. Despite the rhetoric around ‘eat less and move more’, the body has many mechanisms. That means that long term, weight loss is most likely not going to be sustainable, and that even if it is, it will most likely come with negative consequences.

As I mentioned at the start, I’m currently taking on new clients. If you want help with an eating disorder or disordered eating, chronic dieting, body image, exercise compulsion, getting your period back, or any of the other topics I cover as part of the show, then please reach out. You can head over to www.seven-health.com/help for more information.

I’m heading up to Scotland next week, so it will be a rebroadcast episode, but I’ll be back with another new episode after that. Take care, and I’ll catch you then.

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